CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Fischer, Raoul |
|---|---|
| Title | The Peace of Westphalia and the World State: A case for causal pluralism in International Relations |
| Summary | In light of Alexander Wendt’s article promulgating the inevitability of a world state, this thesis explores the constitutive conditions surrounding the formation of competing political communities in early modern Europe in order to probe the efficacy of Teleology as an explanatory device in the study of International Relations. During the period of the Peace of Westphalia, there was little indication that the territorial nation state would develop into the dominant political unit it is known as today. By exploring the development of common social structures leading up to, and after Westphalia, it is argued that although its component treaties are regarded as seminal events of history, the development of statehood was an iteratively constituted process that began centuries earlier and continued for centuries thereafter, and was by no means an inevitable outcome to the actors of the period. Using Wendt’s article as a foil, and ‘Complexity Theory’ as a theoretical lens, it is argued herein that change in the international system occurs when the practices of its actors modify the rules and norms that constitute the system. Such changes in turn, modify the structure of the system allowing new patterns to ‘emerge’ through the self-organization of antecedent events. |
| Supervisor | Kratochwil, Friedrich |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/fischer_raoul.pdf |
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